Brave New World Revisited - Aldous Huxley
Foreword
Being something of a prophet can be a grim responsibility. In Brave New World Revisited, a set of essays published in 1958, Aldous Huxley re-examines the issues and concerns that inspired him to write the novel Brave New World some 27 years earlier. What had come to pass, especially in wake of World War II at the height of the Cold War, disturbed Huxley. He saw an overpopulated world that had gravitated toward his dark vision, in which freedom and individualism were willingly exchanged for sensory pleasure and endless consumption, making “order” out of “chaos” — a world in which people were, as the philosopher Neil Postman suggested, “amusing ourselves to death.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) came by his despair honestly. He remains one of the most interesting figures English literature produced in the early 20th century. His early work bespoke his origins, as the well-bred son of one of England’s most distinctive families (his grandfather helped realize Darwin’s theory of evolution and his great-uncle was Matthew Arnold). But Huxley’s clever, stinging satires of English intellectual life (Crome Yellow, Antic Hay) quickly gave way to a new seriousness with the publication of Brave New World. A vision problem had kept him from pursuing a career in medicine, and maturity brought about in him a spiritual restlessness that was encouraged by his friend D.H. Lawrence. For the remainder of his life — much of it spent in southern California — Aldous Huxley explored political and philosophical issues in his essays and his “novels of ideas.” Brave New World Revisited reflects the fierce intelligence and clear-eyed perception that informed the best of Huxley’s work. It is an invaluable, it’s-later-than-you-think “reality check” for every reader of the novel Brave New World.
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Also available from RosettaBooks is Huxley’s Brave New World.
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